Last week, I read an interview with this guy who makes $10k a month selling e-books on Amazon. I have to be honest, it pissed me off. This guy’s not a writer, he’s an Internet marketer, whatever that means, with spelling mistakes in the introduction and 30-page e-books that really should have been articles. You and me? We’re writers. Yet, he’s putting books out there in the world, earning an income, helping people, and what are we doing? We’re just talking. We’re bullshitting ourselves. (I know I am.)
Life is a series of small choices. The reason that writer has seven books out in the world and you have none is because every day that writer made a small but different choice than you did. Five hundred words instead of cocktails with your mates seemed like a small decision and a big sacrifice at the time, but those sacrifices added up.
It’s not just about the commitment, however. It’s about the fear. The reason you don’t make that small choice every day isn’t because you don’t want to finish that novel or you’re not committed to your writing, it’s because you’re afraid. That blank page seems so much scarier than putting on your overcoat and heading out in the cold frigid air to that full-time job where the money is guaranteed and the chance of your work being ripped to pieces minimal.
The difference between that writer who already has seven books and you is that when it came time to make the tough decisions, you spent weeks researching and procrastinating on making a decision about traditional versus indie publishing whereas that author just picked a path and followed through with it until he got the results he wanted.
When rejections came barging in, they got you down. You fired that New York City agent and wallowed in your misery allowing your rejections to defeat you for a while. That other writer? He chose to be proactive and put his work out into the world anyway.
That writer chose to accept the risk, the judgment, the criticism, no matter how unwillingly, and put himself out there. You didn’t.
They’re small choices, all of them. But they add up. They lead to big results.
The “you” in my above spiel obviously comes from me, my personal experience. I sat there watching as writers finished their novels, published their non-fiction, and just got on with it. I was still stuck on trying to figure out who I was and what role I had to play in the world.
You see, I’ve been guilty just as many of you have, of wanting my first book to be representative of everything I hold dear as a writer, to embody who I am, and my entire life’s work. I didn’t want to write small little books that people could read on the morning commute, I wanted to write the big ones they’d discuss in their book groups, the ones they’d talk about years after I’ve died. No pressure. But not only is it impossible to ask one little book to do all those big things, it’s really really stupid.
You know what I’m talking about. To every single person reading this, a book is a sacred thing. Like me, you probably spent part of your childhood standing in the corner of the library smelling the old, fragile ones. A book to us represents who we are in the world.
I’ve had to learn to stop looking at it in this way. It’s taken years.
I’m not exaggerating. It’s taken at least a decade for me to get to this point where I say, listen, a book is just a book and it’s not the only one I’m going to write and my whole body of work may indeed represent my career but I’m not going to have a body of work if I keep waiting for that one book idea that’s going to represent everything I stand for. I wrote a book in 2005, in fact, published it myself and it sold really well. I made $10,000 in my first year from that book, which was pretty good for a college student in India. But I stopped selling it, I took it off the market, and I haven’t written a book since because I’ve had so many hang-ups about the kind of writer I’m supposed to be.
This year, I got tired of wanting to be an author and so just got my ass into gear and started making different choices on a day-to-day basis. Not big ones, because I’m not ready to set the course for my entire life yet, but small everyday ones. Like choosing to turn down a $500 assignment and using that time to work on my book. Or staying up late after my kid has gone to bed and writing a guest post that will bring a larger audience to my work.
I intentionally made different choices to the ones I’ve been making so far in my career. Lo and behold, I finished my novel. And here I am, getting ready to announce my first (or is it second?) book. It’s called The Freelance Writer’s Guide to Making $1,000 More This Month and I’ll be launching it in November.
Is it going to get on the New York Times bestseller list? No suspense there, I can guarantee that it’s not—it’s just not a broad enough subject. Awards? Nope. But is it going to help you right here, right now, to put more money in your pocket by the end of the month? YES, and I can certainly put the full weight of my convictions behind that claim.
I joined Fizzle, an entrepreneurial community, last week. You know sometimes when you land on a website you’ve never heard of before and have the feeling that you’ve finally found what you were looking for? It was like that for me and it solidified when I took one of the recommended Mindset courses.
In it, one of the co-founders Chase Reeves talks abut that scene in the Star Wars movie when Obi-Wan is giving Luke Skywalker his father’s sword. He says, “We think we’re the main character in our business. We think that we are the Luke Skywalker in the story defeating the bad guy, but that’s not the case. The main character in your story is the audience. They are the main character, they have to defeat the bad guy. You’re like Obi-Wan, you serve them, mentor them, give them the lightsabers, the sword, the whatever they need to defeat the bad guy in their story and complete their quest.”
For a community of writers and journalists, I can’t think of a better analogy. And it cements for me exactly what I’m trying to do at The International Freelancer, but have never been able to express in that way.
My books, the website, this newsletter, are not about me or my journey. I’m not Luke Skywalker, you are. And I’m here as the guide, handing you the sword, showing you the way.
Don’t get me wrong. My goal as a journalist is to do meaningful work that changes the world in my own small way. The work I’ve done on the wastepickers in India is still the writing I’m most proud of and there still remains a lot more of it to be done. I thoroughly intend to keep at it. Between going to the World Domination Summit and hanging out with the trash collectors in Delhi, I would pick those dirty, dusty streets of India any day of the week. And my goal with The International Freelancer is to help you discover that passion and that drive for the subjects you care about and then find a way to make working on them financially sustainable.
The talk, that’s easy. The practice is hard. It’s hard to convince a woman in rural Ghana to trust you enough to tell you how she had to give up her kids, it’s hard to come to the page every day and worry about whether your words are doing people’s lives justice, it’s extremely hard to convince an editor in New York that a destitute brown woman’s story is at least as worthy of a two-page spread as a millionaire white man’s.
And it’s harder still to believe that you should be paid thousands of dollars for finding it.
I’ve learned that the only way to stay happy and productive in this career is to keep showing up to the page, to keep facing the fear, to keep trying to convince those editors, to keep publishing those stories. And to do that every single day until it becomes a daily practice.
Some of my work will be worthy of an award. Some of my work will be worthy of the New York Times bestseller list. And some of it will help a group of writers make $1,000 more this month. That’s a worthy goal, too. It’s taken me ten years to understand that.
I’m okay now with the idea of doing things in the world that make a difference in a myriad number of ways. Are you?